Eve went from ingenue to bawd in the blink of an eye. By the time she and Earl were through in 1971, she’d lost her looks: “[I] gained weight and [my] legs were scuffed with alcoholic black-and-blue stains. . . . [My] beauty had long ago sunk into the sludge of gray-green no-sun pallor; the look with broken pink-eyed blood veins—of someone ‘who drinks.’ ” Her way: “[I] wouldn’t even risk blue paint anymore.” And her mind: “All I took was speed, painkillers like Percodan and Demerol for fun, and painkillers like codeine and Fiorinal for cramps. And I never took downers, except if anyone happened to have any Quaaludes or Mogadons. Oh, and LSD or mushrooms or mescaline if it was a nice day.” There’s a term for this condition, and Eve coined it: squalid overboogie.
If this were the end of Eve’s story, Eve wouldn’t be a story. Eve would be a footnote. A minor figure of glamour in America’s cultural history. A star groupie or a groupie turned semi-star. Basically, Eve would be Edie Sedgwick, so relentless a companion to celebrity that she became a bit of one herself, a few rays of spotlight spilling over onto her, making her luminous, too. Or, rather, Eve would be an alternative version of Edie Sedgwick: L.A. to Edie’s New York; Marcel Duchamp and Jim Morrison to Edie’s Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan; Jewish sexpot to Edie’s WASP gamine. Put slightly differently, Edie and Eve were opposites in ways that only revealed their essential sameness. (And their sameness was essential: born within a month of each other, within a hundred miles, and both Slum Goddesses to boot.) Like Edie, Eve was at the white-hot center of a red-hot scene, then banished. Upon which, Eve, like Edie, found her bloom faded. Became, like Edie, angry, bitter, resentful. And realized, like Edie, that she was less taking drugs than the drugs were taking her. Then, all of a sudden, divergence. Edie went left, Eve right. On November 16, 1971, Edie, age twenty-eight, died. She was in bed with the husband she’d picked up at a recent stint in the loony bin. Zonked from her meds and whatever else she’d ingested, she was unable to lift her head from the pillow, suffocated. An accident-suicide. It was during that very season, fall of ’71, that Eve, age twenty-eight, came back from the dead. She resurrected herself as a writer.
Even before the divergence, though, there was a distinction, key, between Edie and Eve: while Edie and Eve both fucked stars, Edie was a star-fucker; Eve was not. How could she be? The stars she was fucking she was fucking when they were still earthbound, celestial ascension but a dream. Says Steve Martin, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Again, it is Eve’s artist’s eye that set her apart. She saw beauty and value before others did. She went home with people or not home with people (behind the Troubadour was a favorite trysting spot) for, I’m sure, many reasons: for the fun of it, for the thrill of it, for the hell of it. Never, though, for the prestige of it. In a funny way, her ego was too big for that sort of thinking.
Post-Earl, Eve cooled it—for her—on the controlled substances. The blowsiness receded, and she once again began to look “what her mother . . . referred to as ‘your age, dear, eighteen.’ ” There was, too, a new guy in the picture, writer Dan Wakefield. Says David Freeman, also a writer, and a friend of Eve’s, “Dan wasn’t Eve’s usual screwball behavior. He was a real person and very serious about what he did. He liked smart, interesting women, which Eve certainly was. That was a real love affair.” Wakefield, thirty-nine, born in Indianapolis but living in New York and Boston since the early fifties, was a big-time journalist. The entire March 1968 issue of the Atlantic was devoted to his piece on the Vietnam War and the state of American politics. And his first novel, Going All the Way, had been a commercial and critical smash the year before, in 1970. He was riding high.
Wakefield: “I came to L.A. in 1971. The second week I was there, John and Sandy Gibson [publicists at Atlantic] fixed me up with Eve. She walked into the bar wearing the shortest skirt and the tightest sweater I’d ever seen, and when she smiled at me I knew the move to California was going to be everything I hoped it would be. I’d spend my days working at the Chateau Marmont, and at night I’d walk over to Eve’s little place on Formosa. She was beautiful and tremendous fun. One night, an earthquake hit. The TV flew across the room, dishes and glasses broke. I jumped out of bed—off the mattress, to be specific—and started getting dressed. Eve simply looked up and said, ‘What are you going to do, run to Boston?’ So I took off my pants and went back to sleep. Eve was brilliant, but in an offbeat way. She liked to make pronouncements, and she convinced a lot of people of a lot of things. Did you know she was the one who put Steve Martin in that white suit?I And I remember her handing me a stack of books and saying, ‘Read these. They’re Proust with recipes.’ It was M. F K. Fisher, the greatest food writer in the world. So a lot of those opinions of hers were shrewd. There were people, though, who were afraid of her. A guy I knew out there wouldn’t go to a party if she was going. That’s how brutally she’d cut him down. And once she banished me from her apartment for three days. I don’t recall what I’d done—probably flirted with another woman in front of her. I was used to seeing her every day and being shut out was painful. When she told me I could come back, and opened the door, I pulled her to me in a mad rush. I said, ‘How could you have been so cruel?’ She seemed gratified by my distress, and said, ‘When a lover hurts you, you must really make him suffer.’ ”
Wakefield’s reason for being in L.A. was a screenplay. But the reason was, in reality, an excuse. “Thanks to Going All the Way, I had some money for the first time in my life. I optioned a novella by a marvelous writer no one knows, Fanny Howe. It was called Dump Gull. I was trying to adapt it, but not very seriously. Mostly what I wanted was to have a good time. So I was in the movie business, sort of. But Eve was in the music business. And the music business then was what you think of as Hollywood—so extravagant, so lavish. The movie business was small-time compared to it. You don’t do too many drugs if you’re working on a movie because there’s a lot at stake, and you have to be up early. I remember Eve taking me to a party for the release of a new album. It was on the side of a hill in this enormous tent. Beautiful girls in harem costumes were holding gold trays with perfectly rolled joints on them. It was unbelievable. Anyway, as far as I knew, Eve was an album-cover designer and a collage artist. I’ve always made it a point to never have a girlfriend who was a writer.”
Wakefield’s point became beside the point, though, when, a few months into the relationship, Eve showed him what she’d been working on in secret: a piece about her alma mater, Hollywood High, entitled “The Sheik.” (“Dan says I did it in secret? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in secret in my whole life. But maybe I did. Maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”) Wakefield passed “The Sheik” on to his agent, Knox Burger. Wakefield: “Knox was very smart. He’d discovered Kurt Vonnegut when he was the fiction editor at Collier’s magazine. And to be nice to me, he sent Eve a two-page, single-space letter telling her all the things she had to do to the piece to get it published, and he sent me a copy. So I went over to her place that night and said, ‘What did you think of Knox’s letter?’ She put her hands on her hips in her particular way, then said, ‘I hope Knox Burger burns in hell!’ ” And Eve, as self-confident and self-doubting a writer as she’d been an artist, meant it. “I’d already sent ‘The Sheik’ to Jim Goode at Playboy and he’d rejected it and told me what was wrong with it. I hate people who tell me what to do to improve my stuff. They get nowhere with me.”
She then marched “The Sheik” over to Joan Didion, still her friend even if Earl no longer was. (Wakefield, coincidentally, was also close with the Didion-Dunnes, knew them from New York. Wakefield: “After Eve and I began dating, I called up Joan and John. I said to them, ‘I’ve met this terrific girl.’ I told them her name, and there was laughter. And then John said, ‘Ah, yes, Eve Babitz, the dowager groupie.’ ”) Says Eve, “Joan liked ‘The Sheik,’ thought it was a little tour de force. She was all the rage then. Grover [Lewis, an editor at Rolling Stone] asked her to write for him. She couldn’t because of her contract with Life. She recommended me.”
In September, Eve mailed the piece to Lewis. Two weeks later, she received a check. “The Sheik” would be published as a short story in a forthcoming issue. (“I thought it was an essay, but Rolling Stone saw it as fiction, and that was fine with me.”) She could scarcely believe it: not only had her work been accepted, but her work had been accepted with ease and speed, and by a total stranger. She didn’t have to make threats, as she did with Stephen Stills; or break out the sex appeal, as she did with John Van Hamersveld. More important, she didn’t have to look to anybody else’s example, not to Joseph Cornell’s or Andy Warhol’s, instead setting her own.
The experience was revelatory. Wrote Eve, “It was like something I heard somewhere when a person said, ‘You know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have to tap-dance.’ ” Lewis wasn’t even asking for edits on “The Sheik,” was taking it as is. Nor was Rolling Stone just any magazine. Started only four years before, in 1967, by Jann Wenner, it was the counterculture’s bible, and one step ahead of hip. Among its contributors were Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Hunter S. Thompson, who would publish that November, in its pages, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Not among its contributors, however, was Dan Wakefield. Rolling Stone had, in fact, recently rejected a piece of Wakefield’s, which is why, according to Eve, he split with her. “ ‘I’ll see you on Johnny Carson.’ That’s what he said to me when he walked out the door.” Years later she’d write a story, “Black Swans,” about the breakup: “I knew everyone would be glad for me except the one man I actually loved. . . . Normal men aren’t going to love anyone who looks forward to anything but them. And I couldn’t help looking forward to being published.”
And so we reach the point in Eve’s tale where her desire to be one of the boys and her desire to get with the boys become irreconcilable, if only in her head. (Says Wakefield with a laugh, “She gave me the story. I read it and I thought, That’s what she thinks happened? No, no, no, no, no. Our year together was one of my favorite years, but I couldn’t have lived through two of them. My God, the decadence! When I was with her, I tried every drug known to man. At least known to this man. And we were only ever going to be together for a year because I’d already accepted a teaching job at the University of Iowa. From Hollywood to Iowa City—boy, that was an extreme change.”)
It was a drag about Wakefield. Still, the moment was a triumphant one for her, and it altered forever the course of her life. As she herself would marvel, “[I] was twenty-eight. It was time for [me] to O.D., not get published.”
“The Sheik” is, as I said, about Hollywood High, and set ten years after graduation, the narrator sitting at the bar of the Troubadour, catching the scent of rain on the air, and, for a moment, “the past appear[ed] in all its confusion and doubt and pleasure, and [her] high school days surface[d].” The piece is sad, tender, wistful, and passionately contradictory: a romance, and enthralled with love without believing, even for a second, that love is other than doomed; a rhapsody, but a rhapsody on regret, decay, decline, ruin, so a rhapsody that’s also an elegy; a youthful promise made and a youthful promise broken, and in nearly the same breath. Brightness fades, beauty fouls, time passes, it tells us, such is the way of the world. Nostalgia thus becomes, according to its logic, an almost sacred duty, a species of keeping the faith, honoring our losses. And the style of “The Sheik” matches the mood. The writing has a lushness to it, a warmth, a kind of doleful, sensual languor that is purely ravishing. Is closer, in fact, to poetry or music than it is to prose, dependent as it is on rhythm and tempo, melody and tone.
On the girls at Hollywood High:
The girls at our school . . . were extraordinarily beautiful. And there were about 20 of them who separately would cause you to let go of reason. Together—and they stayed pretty much together—they were the downfall of any serious attempt at school in the accepted sense, and everyone knew it. . . . The school was in constant chaos with whispers of their love affairs, their refusals to go along with anything that interrupted their games, scandals, tears, laughter. . . . These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression . . . people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting—like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.
And on Carolyn, the top of the top twenty:
[Carolyn’s] skin was dark and warm—flawless, clear with mauve cheeks like hidden roses. . . . Her hair was hazel or opalescent. . . . Her eyes were the brazen blue—the same color—as the sky in back of the palm trees on the Palisades in summer. . . . She was a captive in the Sheik’s harem, a stranger from the land beyond the sea who never learned to speak nor the purpose of speech, and it would have been more sensible if she’d been made a mute since occasionally she would unfold and stretch . . . her cupid-bow mouth would unsuccessfully try to suppress a yawn, and her tiny snow teeth would show—then she’d back up, sigh, and say, “Fuck, man, I wish today was Friday.”
How not to read in rapt delight?
Eve gave two reasons for writing “The Sheik,” one public, meaning she revealed it to her readers in a book, and the other private, meaning she revealed it to me over the phone.
I’ll start with the private:
“So, Evie,” I said, “what made you write it?”
Eve cracked something with her teeth, a hard something, something with a shell, maybe a pistachio, which she bought in bulk at Trader Joe’s. “Rosalind Frank died.”
“Who’s Rosalind Frank?”
“Rosalind Frank was the most beautiful girl at Hollywood High, and the most beautiful girl at Hollywood High was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I gave a nudge: “Well, what happened to Rosalind Frank?”
“How?”
“An overdose.”
“All right. And?”
Eve took a drink, likely of coconut water, which she also bought in bulk at Trader Joe’s. I gnawed impatiently on a cuticle as she washed down the pistachio or whatever it was. “And I thought the occasion shouldn’t go unmarked.”
I need to pause for a moment, tell you something. When I first read “The Sheik,” I assumed Eve was exaggerating. She had to be. The school she’s describing, never mind the girls in it, couldn’t exist, not even in Hollywood, not even sixty years ago. And I’ve seen Hollywood High. I have one brother, younger, who went to USC for grad school, rented an apartment in West Hollywood. There was a two-year period during which I drove past Hollywood High semi-regularly. It isn’t the kind of place that inspires romantic and fantastical thoughts, okay? You don’t stop at the red on Sunset and Highland, catch it out of the corner of your eye, and start picturing flower-faced nubiles sitting in its classrooms, wilting of boredom, as a middle-aged teacher drones on about the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby or how to solve for x, when they should be sipping Coca-Colas at Schwab’s, or the contemporary equivalent of, waiting for a genie in the form of a talent scout or casting director to make them rich and famous beyond their wildest imaginings. No, you’re more likely to roll up the windows, fumble for the lock button. It looks run-down and tough and, frankly, scary.
Not that I thought Eve was consciously trying to deceive. She believed what she was saying. Anytime she recounted to me an episode in which she’d exhibited extreme sexual verve at a young age, I’d say, “But, Evie, how did you know to do that?,” her reply would invariably be, “I went to Hollywood High.” Like that explained everything. Because in her mind it did. Except her mind and reality weren’t always a precise match. She was the type of person who saw things as they should be, not as they are. She was a dreamer, another way of saying she was an artist, and preoccupied with deeper truths. Only a fool would take her literally.
And then I began doing my research. Eve was technically the class of ’61, though she completed her requirements a semester early, so was suspended between the classes of ’60 and ’61. In those two years alone was enough talent to fill the stables of an MGM or a Paramount. It’s as if Hollywood High were both an American high school and an American high school as portrayed by Hollywood, i.e., an idealized version of an American high school, the teenagers played by actors, i.e., idealized versions of American teenagers. Not a pimple or a pair of braces in sight. There was Tuesday Weld, shooting Wild in the Country with Elvis Presley and Hope Lange (Eve, “Tuesday Weld was a rumor, as far I was concerned. I never saw her at school”); Yvette Mimieux, already a headliner by 1960, co-lead, at eighteen, in the sci-fi classic The Time Machine (Eve, “I knew Yvette was going to be a movie star, even when she cut in front of me in the cafeteria. With that face there was nothing else for her to be”); Linda Evans, Mrs. John Derek before Bo took over the role, and Dynasty’s Krystle Carrington; Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers; Barbara Parkins, the bad girl in Peyton Place, the good girl in Valley of the Dolls, released in 1967 and re-released in 1969 after the death of Parkins’s co-star Sharon Tate; television actress Carole Wells. And a few years behind Eve, in the class of ’63, was her friend Mimsy Farmer, who’d have a film career, too, if mostly in Europe. There were also the children of movie stars: Dana Andrews’s daughter, Kathy, for one. And Rosalind Frank blew them all clean away.
It’s not easy finding information on Rosalind. Near impossible, in fact. She’s not even in the 1961 Hollywood High yearbook (though neither, for that matter, is Eve). She is, however, in another book, Upper Cut, a memoir by Carrie White, a well-known L.A. hairstylist. Carrie was, like Rosalind, in the Deltas—“the top sorority, absolutely the prettiest, cuntiest girls in school,” says Eve—and was Rosalind’s best friend.
I wrote Carrie a message on Facebook and we met at the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel when I was in town a few weeks later. Carrie, pert, blond, slender, is the most girlish-looking seventy-two-year-old I’ve ever seen, a former Playboy Playmate, Miss July 1963. She’s also a lively, funny talker. (“Oh, I was an alcoholic way before high school. The first time I was picked up for public drunkenness, I was nine. A police officer came up to me on the street and said, ‘How old are you?’ I said, ‘I’m fine. How are you?’ ”) And her recollections of Hollywood High and Rosalind have the same shimmer as Eve’s:
Let me tell you, Hollywood High was church. There was something almost spiritual about it. I’m not kidding. It was so beautiful—the trees, the quad, the girls. And, my God, the sororities. If you weren’t in a sorority, it was, like, ‘Do you exist? You’re just an extra in our movie.’ The Deltas were it. We were the rock stars and the beauty queens. We ran everything, including the teachers, who wanted to give up their degrees and date us. It seemed like all the girls in it were famous or about to be famous. Linda Evans was already at Paramount. I think Barbara Parkins had already been cast in Peyton Place. Years later Barbara and I were both at Sharon Tate’s wedding to Roman Polanski in London. I did Sharon’s hair. Stefanie Powers—she was called Taffy Paul then—was discovered by Ann Sothern [actress and singer] in a Hollywood High musical. Even I got a contract with MGM. I was supposed to be the girl in an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, but then it fell through. And Roz was the best of us. Everybody in school knew who she was. Everybody. She was that glamorous. We were all like deer in headlights when we looked at her. She had these blue cat eyes, and this delicious skin that was always tan, a perfect straight nose, perfect lips, always with the Max Factor Essence of Pearl lipstick. She wore her hair like Veronica Lake, one strand sort of over her eye. And her clothes! The black dresses that tapered at the knee, black spaghetti-strap sheaths. She kept her diet pills—her Dexedrine—in this little gold box in her purse. I’d cover my awe, but most of the time I just couldn’t get over her perfection. She seemed to have the script to life. All the boys were crazy about her. She didn’t date high school boys, though. None of us did. We wanted to be grown up, in contact with the world. We dated men. I dated an actor named Danny Zephyros. He was a muscleman in the Mae West Revue. Then, to get over him, I dated another actor, Jack Nicholson. Jack was twenty-three or twenty-four then. He’d done one of those Roger Corman horror pictures, not much else yet, but he already had that smile and those eyebrows. He took me to an acting class and said, ‘Okay, Carrie, your first acting job is to act eighteen.’ Roz was tortured over this married guy, I remember. Some music mogul. He’d call her at midnight and she’d go see him.
Carrie and I talked for more than three hours that morning. As I left her at the counter, taking the stairs to the lobby in bunches because time had flown and I was already twenty minutes late to my next appointment, my heart began to beat so hard and fast I could feel it in my throat, the tips of my fingers. I was experiencing one of those renewals-of-faith-in-Eve moments. She’d got it right again. No way could she have got it right again, but she’d got it right again.
A refusal to let the occasion go unmarked was, for Eve, a hereditary trait. Her mother, Mae Babitz, born Lily May Laviolette in Crowley, Louisiana, in 1911, was the daughter of a French Cajun teenager, Agnes, and the man who raped Agnes. Agnes was pressured by the church to marry her rapist, resisted, was excommunicated. She took Lily May and moved to Sour Lake, Texas, birthplace of Texaco, pitched a tent beside the oil rigs so that she and Lily May would have somewhere to sleep, and began cooking chili for roughnecks.
The Depression had just started when Lily May finished high school. She went to work for $4 a week at her mother’s hot dog stand. Her days were spent fending off passes and collecting nickel tips in the pink-checked uniform she made herself. Says Mirandi, “Mother was so close with Agnes. They were only sixteen years apart. Agnes had bad husbands. The worst was Joe Forman. He was a bootlegger and an alcoholic and a wife beater, and he was after Mother since she was very young. And I don’t think Mother felt she could leave Agnes with him.” The hell Lily May was trapped in was a particularly American kind: hard luck, hard times, mother love, self-destructive loyalty.
And then, five years later, deliverance. It came in two forms. A priest, who found Lily May a driver headed West, saving her train fare. And a gambler on whom Agnes decided to roll the dice. Mirandi: “Charlie Spillars became Agnes’s next husband. Either he got rid of Joe or Joe just left. Charlie was always losing money, but he was an absolute sweetheart. He and Agnes adored each other. And I think that’s what finally freed my mother.”
Lily May arrived in Hollywood in 1934. She must’ve blinked her eyes, dried out from the Dust Bowl and the fluorescent Texas sun and the ugly, oil-reeking air. Maybe she also rubbed them because it would be hard to credit what they were seeing: palm trees, the leaves heavy, fleshy, swaying gracefully under a sky of blue both deep and soft; slanting, honeyed light spilling densely across the fronts of the buildings, horizontal rather than vertical and sleepy-looking, the cottages, wooden and A-frame or Spanish-style, white stucco with red-tile roofs; trolleys moving people unhurriedly to and fro and back again on wide streets that still had, as she’d soon discover, long rural stretches, orange groves on either side; and, most thrillingly of all, in the near distance, above Bronson Canyon, on Mount Lee, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, erected in 1923, an advertisement for a real estate development, and the site, the year before, of a spectacular suicide, a young woman named Peg Entwistle jumping off the H after failing to make it in motion pictures (Lily May had no interest in those, but she very much did in enchantment, the other local product). And as she stood there, breathing in the delicate scent of the jasmine blossoms, feeling the lazy, languid weight of the breeze—ocean, even though the Pacific was miles away—its touch on her face as gentle as a caress, she probably wondered if she wasn’t dreaming or dead. Reality here simply wasn’t real.
Lily May immediately dropped the Lily, along with the country accent, and changed regular old American May to the more exotic Mae. A whiz typist thanks to a class she’d taken at the Chenier Business School in Beaumont, she had no trouble finding work: as the receptionist at the office of Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, a prominent gynecologist. The job was unrelated to show business in any way, except through marriage. Thorpe’s wife was actress Mary Astor. Two years after he hired Mae, Thorpe took a peek inside Astor’s diary. The ink she used was plain brown, but the writing was gaudiest purple, especially when describing an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. Thorpe promptly filed for divorce, and the custody battle between him and Astor over their daughter became the scandal of 1936. The diary was the star witness, the one whose testimony everybody had been dying to hear ever since Thorpe began leaking passages to newspapers: “[George] fits me perfectly . . . many exquisite moments . . . twenty—count them, diary, twenty.”
Marital discord was something Mae knew plenty about. Her husband, the Italian with the Mexican name, Pancho, kept irregular hours. Maître d’s at the city’s most exclusive nightclub didn’t come home until dawn, and Pancho often came home later than that because he believed having a wife was no reason not to also have a girlfriend. There were other problems, too. The big one: he wasn’t what she wanted. So when in 1942 she met Sol, a not-quite-divorced New York violinist with an unshakable conviction that the Wagnerian style of playing Bach was wrong as wrong could be, and a cute William Powell gigolo mustache, plus an aunt who was under contract at RKO (it wasn’t Sol’s genius that landed him the job as a studio musician, it was Aunt Vera’s connections), the timing and circumstances weren’t as dire as might initially have been supposed. Mae, in this order: got pregnant, converted to Judaism, divorced Pancho, married Sol. And, a scant four months following the wedding, on May 13, 1943, gave birth to Eve. And since Sol and Mae Babitz were those rare lucky someones for whom love actually worked out, they lived happily ever after.
Sol and Mae Babitz, 1942
Now, Mae was a woman of immense daring. She put it all on the line. Born into the situation she was, poverty and obscurity a near given, she pretty much had to. But she understood the value of what she’d won, was careful never to risk it. She’d been so close to having no kind of life at all. (She was almost twenty-three when she escaped Sour Lake, twenty-nine when she found Sol.) Which is why she saw L.A. for what it was: a heart-stopping mixture of blue sky and green pasture and blue-green sea, and virtually untouched. She didn’t need to lose Paradise to realize she was in it.
She even tried to save it. In 1958, Mae became one of the founders of the committee dedicated to rescuing Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers from destruction. (She got Picasso to sign the petition.) In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, she’d write, “History’s tallest structure ever built by a single person shall survive intact.” And so it did.
Then there was her own art. A rage for newer, bigger, better swept through L.A. in the fifties. Buildings and houses from the turn of the century, elegant and majestic, were being torn down left and right, junked like old movie sets, to make way for monstrosities, bland and anonymous. Mae’s method was, in her words, “to stay one step ahead of the smashing ball.” Says Mirandi, “Mother used to bump into the man who ran the Cleveland Wrecking Company at sites. They became friends. He started calling her when he got a job. He’d tell her, ‘We’re going to be at such and such a place in three months.’ She’d grab her card table and her folding chair, her pencils and pads, and go. Usually she’d take me and Evie with her. I’d bring my homework, and Evie would bring a book, and we’d just sort of hang out while she drew.” Mae’s sketches of the Hollywood Hotel, the original Los Angeles High School, the Angels Flight Railway at Hill Street, are among the only records of these structures that exist. And to see her work in its entirety is to see a city that’s vanished, a city that wasn’t a city at all, but a drowsy Spanish outpost, the ghost town called Los Angeles that haunts the sleek, tense, ultramodern urban experience known as L.A.
Eve inherited her mother’s eyes, no matter that they were the exact color and shape of her father’s. Eyes that stayed bright, stayed devious, that always saw for the first time even when they saw for the thousandth. And what Eve did for Rosalind Frank was what Mae did for the Victorians on Figueroa. She made sure something remained. “The Sheik” is a record, a testament, a firsthand account of a natural phenomenon—a beauty so powerful it was a black hole, sucking up everything around it, including its possessor. It appears to have left Rosalind without character or ambition or even a distinct personality. If ever there was a shoo-in for movie stardom, she was it. It didn’t happen, though. The reason: she was already a star in life. How could she be expected to audition, to hustle, to cope? Wrote Eve, “People took care of [Rosalind]. Usually, her sorority sisters, but if they weren’t there, then anyone who was would automatically assume responsibility. It wasn’t that she was retarded; it was just that she couldn’t scrape up even a sliver of interest in the proceedings and couldn’t see why she should, and no one else could think of a good enough reason, either—at least, one that made sense when you looked at her.” In short, Rosalind was too much the thing to be the thing. Hollywood High was her movie, and when the movie ended, she was adrift, without an arc or a script to follow, supporting actors to keep her from missing her cues or flubbing her lines, a director to tell her where to stand or how to look. Her suicide was a confession of her vacancy. She faded to black because she couldn’t think what else to do.
Which is to say, I accept that her death is the reason Eve wrote “The Sheik.” Or, rather, I accept it is a reason. In the story, the narrator finds out that the Rosalind character OD’d two months prior. In life, however—and this to me is a crucial difference—Rosalind OD’d almost two years prior, in early 1970. Says Carrie White, “Roz was always in a heartbreak. The man-trap business was the only thing she developed. So if a man left, it just destroyed her. She came into my salon one day. She was hysterical, was so freaked-out from all the Dexedrine pills she was seeing spiders. I grabbed them from her and said, ‘You’re still taking these rough-housers?’ And then I flushed them down the toilet. She lost it, ran out. Soon after that, I got the call. Her family said it was an accidental overdose, something to do with a miscarriage. I don’t know. There were mixed stories.” So Eve had been sitting on this knowledge for a while before she started feeding paper into her typewriter. A more urgent impetus, therefore, must exist.
Now for the public reason. Eve gave it in her 1982 book, L.A. Woman. The Eve character is an artist-photographer, Jim Morrison her on-again, off-again lover. She calls him her “tar baby” and credits him as her inspiration. Or, I suppose, properly speaking, anti-inspiration:
I was so mad at [Jim Morrison’s] L.A., [Jim’s Morrison’s] Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude, that every picture I began to take was proof he was wrong—and they really worked. They were casual but in an obsessed kind of way since I wanted to make L.A. look as though even a child could see that the bungalows and palm trees were only bungalows and palm trees and not out to kill the rest of the world.
“The Sheik,” so full of freshness and wonder, did precisely that, which is why I buy the above reason without qualification. Without qualification but with a substitution: swap out Jim Morrison, put in Joan Didion.
Eve’s Esquire piece makes clear that she had great affection for Morrison, but little respect. It’s highly doubtful, therefore, that any idea rattling around his pretty head would get her blood so boiling she’d feel the need to seek aesthetic revenge. She didn’t take him seriously enough to pay him that compliment. And besides, when she wrote “The Sheik” in 1971, Morrison was in a bad way: mired in troubles both legal and personal, physically deteriorating, spiritually depleted. After a disastrous concert in New Orleans on December 12, 1970, he’d stopped performing live. John Densmore, the Doors’ drummer, from his memoir Riders on the Storm: “Jim wasn’t even drunk, but his energy was fading. Later Ray [Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist] remarked that during the set he saw all of Jim’s psychic energy go out the top of his head. . . . I knew the band’s public life was over. I saw a sad, old blues singer who’d been great once but couldn’t get it up anymore.” In other words, Morrison of 1971 was not Morrison of 1967, a figure of youth and beauty and potency, a modern-day Orpheus. He was fat, flaccid, loaded, going through the motions. A stricken man. And by July of that year he’d be a dead one. So the timing’s off with him, same as it is with Rosalind.
How’s this for timing? Didion, in 1970, when Eve was as intimately involved with Earl McGrath and his crowd as she’d ever be, published a novel, Play It as It Lays, about an actress named Maria Wyeth. Maria spends her days going everywhere, going nowhere, just driving the freeways, as her marriage and life fall apart: “Again and again [Maria] returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”
(What, by the way, I mean by “intimately involved”: Eve, because of her association with Earl, is responsible, if inadvertently, for the ending of Play It. Says Eve, “Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town. I remember her once lying down on the floor of my apartment—I was having a dinner party, Joan and John were there, Earl was there—and telling that amazing story about her friend Tamar. [Tamar Hodel, twenty-six, decided to kill herself after a failed love affair. She asked a then seventeen-year-old Phillips to help. Phillips, believing it wasn’t her place to tell Hodel, an adult, what to do, agreed. Hodel swallowed a bottle of Seconal. Phillips fell asleep beside Hodel in bed. Fortunately, friends came home in time to call an ambulance.] I guess Joan was listening.” I phone Phillips, relay Eve’s words to her. Phillips laughs. “Oh, yeah, Joan was listening. She called me up the next day and said, ‘Is it all right if I use that story you told in the book I’m working on?’ And I said, ‘Go ahead, it’s all yours.’ ” In Play It’s climactic scene, Maria cradles the married-but-homosexual producer, the Earl-like BZ, as he overdoses on Seconal. She falls asleep beside him in bed. Friends come home, though, unfortunately, not in time to call an ambulance.)
L.A., where the story’s set, is presented as a twentieth-century Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone all it deserves, what it has coming. Play It, whatever your feelings about it are, can’t be dismissed, not the way Morrison’s lyrics (“There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad”) and song titles (“Hello, I Love You”) can. Interestingly, Didion, unlike Eve, wasn’t inclined to dismiss Morrison. On the contrary, she was very much taken with him when she, in the spring of ’68, attended a Doors recording session. She’d write about her time in the studio in The White Album, referring to his band, and without a hint of irony or sarcasm, as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex.” It’s difficult to imagine a description that would be more gratifying to its descriptee.
Play It is a literary achievement—the momentum building along with the dread; the pitch, high and fevered and trembling, sustained; the prose, pared down, charged, electric even—and its writer a serious talent. It was a sensation when it came out, an instant seminal Hollywood book, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its absolute contempt for everything Hollywood. In mood (dark) and vision (doomsday), it’s close to another seminal Hollywood book, Nathanael West’s 1939 The Day of the Locust, the central metaphor of which, a painting by the artist-protagonist entitled The Burning of Los Angeles, is made literal in the final scene: a crowd of starstruck fans turning into a foaming-mouthed mob, a movie premiere into an orgy of violence and destruction.
Now, look sharp because things are about to take a turn for the funky. Eve conflated Morrison and Didion. She also, however, conflated Didion and West, and for essentially the same reasons. She loathed The Day of the Locust, like Play It a formidable work, yet one Eve had no problem sticking it to. In a very angry, very funny piece called “And West (né Weinstein) Is East Too” she wrote:
All of the things that Nathanael West noticed are here. The old people dying, the ennui, the architecture and fat screenplay writers who think it’s a tragedy when they can’t get laid by the 14-year-old doxette in Gower Gulch, the same 14-year-old who’ll ball the cowboys any old time. But if there had been someone, say, who wrote a book about New York, a nice, precise, short little novel in which New York was only described as ugly, horrendous and finally damned and that was the book everyone from elsewhere decided was the “best book about New York there ever was,” people who grew up knowing why New York was beautiful would finally, right before dessert, throw their sherry across the table and yell, “I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey, and take you for a fucking guided tour, you blind jerk.”
Alter a few of the specifics, and Eve could have been describing Play It as It Lays, and the dismal view it took of L.A., pretending to tell the whole truth about the city while telling a partial truth at best.
I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he’d gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood. It’s a little apologia for coming to the Coast for the money and having a winter where you didn’t have to put tons of clothes on just to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer.
Alter fewer of the specifics and Eve could have been describing Didion, half of a literary couple that the charitably disposed might term “careerist,” the uncharitably “two-faced.” Didion and Dunne were Hollywood people from the mid-sixties until Dunne’s death in 2003. Yet they always let it be known that they were only writing scripts so they could afford to write books, were East Coast intellectuals slumming, basically. They’d cash the studio checks while simultaneously distancing themselves from the resulting crummy movie—one or the other of them often writing a piece for a classy New York publication about the experience after it was over that struck an arch, insiderish tone—even reveling in the resulting crummy movie, as if the crumminess were further evidence of their superiority, proof that they’d sold nothing when they’d sold out. (Dunne would go so far as to write an entire book in such a vein, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, in which he detailed his and Didion’s involvement with the 1996 Robert Redford–Michelle Pfeiffer clunker Up Close & Personal, alternately boasting and bemoaning.)
And yet Eve wasn’t describing Didion or Play It as It Lays. And she wasn’t calling Didion a “blind jerk” or accusing Didion of copping a “Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude.” She’d go after West or Morrison instead. Or rather in lieu. She could express her feelings about Didion but only by proxy. Why?
In the fall of 2015, I spoke to Eve for a piece I was doing on Didion in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. Eve, who loves and hates with a child’s purity and holds nothing back,II was reticent, cagey. At least on certain topics. She’d talk to me, on the record, for example, about her memories of Didion’s amphetamine use: “Joan and I connected. The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she’d take downers, but really she’s a Hells Angel girl, white trash. I thought [she] was more in control than [the rest of us] were, but I reread The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” She wouldn’t talk to me, though, about Didion’s work, even after I’d switched off my recorder. She’d say that Didion’s books were “great”—every time, that word and no other—and then shut the conversation down.
When my Didion piece appeared, I didn’t send Eve a copy or breathe a word of it. What I wrote about Didion was respectful but tough, and I was sure Eve would be angry, think I’d elicited information from her under false pretenses. Tricked her, in essence. My hope was that she’d forget we’d ever done the interview, walk right past the issue on newsstands. And then my cell rang, her name flashing across the screen. I hit ACCEPT, a tight, sour ball of dread forming in the pit of my stomach. But before I could stammer out a hello, she crowed, “You did it! You killed Joan Didion! I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me!”
To be clear, I did not kill Joan Didion. I could not kill Joan Didion. No one could. She’s too good. That, though, isn’t the vital thing here. The vital thing is that Eve was overjoyed because she believed I killed Joan Didion. As the ball dissolved, I listened to her talk. And talk. It was as if she’d been under a curse, now lifted, and her tongue, unbewitched, was able to speak the truth: Didion had been the making of her, so she couldn’t say a word against Didion. (Publicly discussing Didion’s taste for uppers is not, in her mind, a betrayal since to her drugs are just things people do, no embarrassment or shame attached.) It was so duh-duh obvious that, for several seconds, I was rendered mute. Eve was grateful. That was the explanation. And if Eve had been anybody else, I’d have guessed it at once. Wouldn’t have needed to guess, would have assumed. In this case, however, it didn’t even occur to me. Gratitude didn’t seem like the kind of emotion Eve would entertain—too modest, too humble, too ordinary. But she did, and there you go.
So I have inside information and it backs up my theory: Eve started writing in reaction to Didion. (If I’d paid closer attention to the dedication pages of her first book, the one in which “The Sheik” appears, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble: “And to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.”) Didion was the tar baby, Morrison and West the decoy ducks. And you could argue—I am arguing—that Eve’s entire literary career was a response to, nay, a rebuttal of, Play It as It Lays.
Eve didn’t become a writer like that, out of nowhere. Not quite, anyway. There’d been an attempt, just the one, earlier.
In her late teens, while she was in Italy with Sol and Mae—“I lived in Rome for almost a year and the only word of Italian I learned was cazzo [slang term for penis]”—Eve began a novel, or, rather, a memoir masquerading as a novel, “Travel Broadens.” “Travel Broadens” was Daisy Miller, except Daisy Miller turned on its head. Instead of the decadent Old World corrupting the innocent American girl, as happened in Henry James’s tale, it was the other way around. (This plot summary, incidentally, is Eve’s, not mine. I’ve got to rely on her memory, can’t consult my own since I’ve never read the book, all known copies having been lost.) Eve completed “Travel Broadens” at the tail end of ’61, during a short trip back to L.A. Before rejoining her family, she sent a letter to Joseph Heller, then thirty-eight, who’d published, earlier that year, Catch-22, a landmark cultural event.
The letter, in its entirety:
Dear Joseph Heller,
I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.
Eve BabitzIII
It was a provocative letter. As provocative a letter as the Wasser-Duchamp photo was a photo, and in exactly the same way—Eve once again playing for a celebrated artist and considerably older man the sexy, boobalicious girl while also kidding the idea of playing the sexy, boobalicious girl. Heller was provoked. (This, by the bye, is one of those times when Eve and I had a But-Evie-how-did-you-know-to-do-that / I-went-to-Hollywood-High exchange.) Says Eve, “I heard back from Joe quickly. He wrote, ‘Have you actually written anything?’ So I mailed him one hundred and twenty-three pages, or however many pages I had, and he laughed his head off and gave them to Robert Gottlieb [the young editor at Simon & Schuster who’d discovered Catch].” It was an auspicious beginning, and that’s where it ended. Eve: “Gottlieb said the book needed more. I didn’t know what he meant by ‘more,’ and I didn’t try to find out. I just thought, Uh-oh, and that was it.”
Well, Is that the blue you’re using? isn’t the only way of asking, Is that the blue you’re using?
I. Wakefield didn’t sound as if he was kidding when he told me this, but I still half thought he was. The white suit is as much a part of Martin’s persona—at least Martin’s early persona—as the prematurely gray hair. How could it have been anyone’s idea but his own? “No, Dan’s right,” Eve said when I raised the subject with her. “That was me. There was this great French photographer, Henri Lartigue. He took pictures of Paris in the twenties. All his people wore white. I showed his photographs to Steve. ‘You’ve got to look like this,’ I said. He actually listened.” It took me a while, but I finally got Martin on the phone. And he confirmed: the white suit was indeed all Eve.
II. Once when were out at lunch, a woman—Eve’s age—perfectly pleasant seeming, waved from a neighboring table. Eve didn’t return the wave. I asked Eve who the woman was, and she said, eyes wide, voice grave, “That’s my enemy.” (Eve and the woman had, as it happened, shared a boyfriend forty years before.)
III. This, I should confess, is only one version of the letter, and it isn’t the first version I heard. The first version I heard was Nan Blitman’s. Blitman, Eve’s friend and former agent, recalled Eve describing the letter thusly: “Dear Mr. Heller, I’m sitting on a bench on Sunset Boulevard in a wet bathing suit. I’ve written a novel. I’m eighteen.” As soon as I hung up with Blitman, I phoned Eve. Trying to tamp down my excitement, I asked her about the letter, but did not repeat Blitman’s words out of fear of contaminating her memory. She gave me the version quoted above. (Eve, by the way, never volunteers information, no matter how relevant or useful. She’s like one of those riddle-speaking figures in myths and fairy tales. She’ll answer any question you ask, except you have to know exactly what question to ask, and how precisely to ask it. That’s the trick and the challenge.) Afterward, though, I did quote Blitman’s words to her, and she conceded that it could be Blitman who has it right. It’s a pick-and-choose-type situation. And just because I picked and chose Eve’s version doesn’t mean you have to.